It's a little-acknowledged reality that housing markets distribute more than mere dwellings. That's because people's place in the social order is intimately related to their geographic location generally, and where they live specifically.

Housing quality functions both as a reflection and driver of inequality. Beyond that, however, better homes come with better neighborhoods that afford other opportunity-expanding advantages: good, well-funded schools; high-quality and readily available health care; agreeable recreational facilities and parks; full-service grocery stores with healthy foods; excellent retail outlets; nice sit-down restaurants; well-kept roads and other infrastructure; safe distance from pollutants, major transport and cargo routes; proximity to pleasing natural vistas and settings; a vibrant civic and institutional life; abundant professional services; enjoyable public facilities, events and more. The least pleasant, spacious, healthy and expensive homes are commonly found in places where these and many other interrelated social premiums are scarce.

One's chances of moving up in the social order are enhanced when one can move over in the spatial order-- over to communities that offer more opportunity for social advancement. That's the underlying truth of the classic theme song from "The Jeffersons," a TV show that followed the travails of a middle-class black family that leaves the ghetto for a more affluent neighborhood of Manhattan. "Well we're movin' on up," the lyric went, "To the East Side." (Of course, gaining spatial entry to the privileged Upper East Side required the Jeffersons to first move up the economic ladder in order to afford access to the spatial and residential premiums of predominantly wealthy white living.)

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When it comes to raising a child, a modest home in an opportunity-rich community might be preferable to a higher-end home in an opportunity-poor community. (My working-class mother-in-law's decision to keep her family in a small house across from the Illinois Central Railroad in an affluent middle-class suburb meant that each of her children attended a first-rate high school -- a welcome byproduct of the neighborhood's hefty property taxes. This education, in turn, prepared them for higher education and a professional career.)

The nation's tenacious racial separatism both reflects and reinforces this disparity, reminding us that separate remains unequal in a society where social and political resources are distributed unevenly.

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The black middle class is not immune. It remains highly segregated and lives in much greater proximity to poverty, crime, police harassment and disease than does the white middle class.

Extreme black-white segregation spans entire metropolitan areas -- which include numerous "inner-ring" suburbs like Harvey and Dixmoor, immediately south of Chicago, and Inkster, Mich., outside Detroit -- and the nation itself. Black Americans are spatially concentrated in cities and large metropolitan areas. They are remarkably scarce in the nation's hinterland, excepting a handful of rural black communities that date back to Reconstruction.

The Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North from 1916 through the 1960s was to disproportionately urban localities. This reflected both the location of the industrial workplaces that drew migrants from the racially hyper-oppressive South (Chicago's packing-houses and steel mills; Detroit's auto plants; Akron, Ohio's tire factories; and so on), and the often-brutal hostility white small town and rural communities north of the Mason-Dixon Line showed to blacks in their midst. "Sundown Towns," where blacks were unwelcome and found themselves in danger if seen "after sundown" (or before, often enough), were common across border states and the Upper Midwest during this era.

The nation's enduring apartheid also has chilling implications for the nation's increasingly polarized politics. It's hard for citizens to form bonds of empathy and solidarity across racial lines when they experience so much of American life separately and unequally -- even when they live in close proximity. (I am writing this essay in a condominium development on Rosa Parks Boulevard in Nashville, Tennessee's Germantown neighborhood. The development inhabits a former cotton, flour and burlap bag mill that once employed hundreds of black and white workers, providing both groups with livable wages and a shared workplace. The plant closed decades ago. It was then purchased by a developer and refurbished with hundreds of fetching lofts housed almost exclusively with white professionals. Just across the street, which takes its name from civil rights hero Rosa Parks, the blocks are completely black and poor. The two neighborhoods might as well be distant planets.)

Thanks in large part to this racial separatism, the black experience -- working and middle class -- is largely invisible to most of white America. Without direct contact, whites get much, if not most, of their highly distorted sense of black reality through the filter of corporate media. Here, two images predominate.

On the one hand, there's a parade of successful and affluent black sports, media and entertainment personalities (including anchors on most metropolitan television news teams), along with the occasional black political star like Colin Powell, Eric Holder, Patrick Duvall or Barack Obama. This helps feed the wildly false but widely held white belief, especially strong among the nation's predominantly white Republican voters, that blacks are "getting ahead of whites" and that whites are the true victims of racial discrimination.

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On the other, there are the news networks' nightly footage of criminals and gang members and frequent portrayal of blacks as slothful, violence-prone offenders -- especially in neofascistic law-and-order shows like "Blue Bloods," "Cops," and their ilk. Beyond helping drive white support for the nation's giant, historically unmatched system of mass incarceration, this "urban nightmare" media feeds conservatives' belief that any kind of black advancement is undeserved and unjustly enabled by leftists, who have rigged the American Dream against virtuous and hard-working white Americans.

At the same time, blacks' ubiquity across our national media leads whites to radically overestimate the nation's African-American population. (Whites believe nearly a third of the country is black, when in fact it's closer to 12 percent.) This only fuels fears that whites are becoming, or have indeed already become, an overwhelmed and embattled minority in the U.S. That the Obamas occupied the White House for eight years has only encouraged this paranoia.

Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org and paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (2004), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (2007), Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (more...)